Margaret Wade Labarge Prize

Eligibility

Any book in the field of medieval studies (including monographs, editions, translations, and other categories as determined by the Prize Committee), authored or co-authored, translated or co-translated, edited or co-edited, etc. (the test being at least 50% participation) by a Canadian or someone resident in Canada. Edited collections of essays are not eligible.

2018 - Shannon McSheffrey, Seeking Sanctuary. Oxford UP, 2017.

Congratulations to Shannon McSheffrey who was awarded the 2018 Margaret Wade Labarge Prize for her book Seeking Sanctuary (Oxford UP, 2017). For details on the book, see below.

From the publisher:

Seeking Sanctuary explores a curious aspect of premodern English law: the right of felons to shelter in a church or ecclesiastical precinct, remaining safe from arrest and trial in the king's courts. This is the first volume in more than a century to examine sanctuary in England in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Looking anew at this subject challenges the prevailing assumptions in the scholarship that this 'medieval' practice had become outmoded and little-used by the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Although for decades after 1400 sanctuary-seeking was indeed fairly rare, the evidence in the legal records shows the numbers of felons seeing refuge in churches began to climb again in the late fifteenth century and reached its peak in the period between 1525 and 1535. Sanctuary was not so much a medieval practice accidentally surviving into the early modern era, as it was an organism that had continued to evolve and adapt to new environments and indeed flourished in its adapted state. Sanctuary suited the early Tudor regime: it intersected with rapidly developing ideas about jurisdiction and provided a means of mitigating the harsh capital penalties of the English law of felony that was useful not only to felons but also to the crown and the political elite. Sanctuary's resurgence after 1480 means we need to rethink how sanctuary worked, and to reconsider more broadly the intersections of culture, law, politics, and religion in the years between 1400 and 1550.

Since finishing her PhD at the University of Toronto in 1992, Shannon McSheffrey has taught at Concordia University in Montreal, where she is now Professor of History. She has won several awards for her research and teaching. Over the last twenty-five years she has published books and articles on a number of aspects of late medieval and Tudor England, exploring issues as varied as gender roles, law, civic culture, marriage, literacy, heresy, and popular religion. Seeking Sanctuary grew out of a curiosity about how English people in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries used law, legal records, and legal archives.

2017 - Levi Roach, Æthelred the Unready. Yale UP, 2016.

Congratulations to Levi Roach! He won the Margaret Wade Labarge prize for his book Aethelred the Unready (Yale UP, 2016). For details on the winning book, see below.

From the publisher:

An imaginative reassessment of Æthelred "the Unready," one of medieval England’s most maligned kings and a major Anglo-Saxon figure

The Anglo-Saxon king Æthelred "the Unready" (978–1016) has long been considered to be inscrutable, irrational, and poorly advised. Infamous for his domestic and international failures, Æthelred was unable to fend off successive Viking raids, leading to the notorious St. Brice’s Day Massacre in 1002, during which Danes in England were slaughtered on his orders. Though Æthelred’s posthumous standing is dominated by his unsuccessful military leadership, his seemingly blind trust in disloyal associates, and his harsh treatment of political opponents, Roach suggests that Æthelred has been wrongly maligned. Drawing on extensive research, Roach argues that Æthelred was driven by pious concerns about sin, society, and the anticipated apocalypse. His strategies, in this light, were to honor God and find redemption. Chronologically charting Æthelred’s life, Roach presents a more accessible character than previously available, illuminating his place in England and Europe at the turn of the first millennium.

Levi Roach is lecturer at the University of Exeter, and formerly a junior research fellow at St John’s College, Cambridge. He lives in Exeter, UK.

Fiona Somerset’s book's importance in developing the MS basis for its field, and that field's contribution to late-medieval religious and social history, is undoubted. The sheer wealth of sources which provide evidence of diverse lollard teachings on living a virtuous life, stories, saints, praying, and "feeling," revise previous assumptions about lollards and provide a more nuanced perspective than ever before. It is a significant piece of scholarship, looking at a wide range of manuscript sources and challenging the assumptions of the whole field of Lollard scholarship. . . . Whether or not Somerset is correct in her readings of sources she classifies as Lollard, her work will be one that future scholars have to ‘answer’ if they are going to look at any of these writings. More...

How did medieval Europeans use and change their environments, think about the natural world, and try to handle the natural forces affecting their lives? This groundbreaking environmental history examines medieval relationships with the natural world from the perspective of social ecology, viewing human society as a hybrid of the cultural and the natural. Richard Hoffmann's interdisciplinary approach sheds important light on such central topics in medieval history as the decline of Rome, religious doctrine, urbanization and technology, as well as key environmental themes, among them energy use, sustainability, disease and climate change. Revealing the role of natural forces in events previously seen as purely human, the book explores issues including the treatment of animals, the 'tragedy of the commons', agricultural clearances and agrarian economies. By introducing medieval history in the context of social ecology, it brings the natural world into historiography as an agent and object of history itself.

2014 ~ Frank Klaassen, The Transformation of Magic: Illicit Learned Magic in the Later Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013.

Klaassen’s elegantly written monograph is an incisive analysis of an understudied body of evidence. His argument that two types of “illicit learned magic” characterized the period between 1300 and 1600 brings coherence and clarity to an intellectual tradition that has too often been overlooked. By locating magical texts within broad theological, philosophical, and scholarly traditions and by emphasizing the continuities between medieval ritual magic and Renaissance texts, Klaassen challenges his readers to see medieval and Renaissance intellectual culture in new ways. His work thus not only makes a valuable contribution to the history of magic in the premodern era, but it also participates in conversations about the periodization of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. His study stood out in a year in which there were several strong contenders for the Labarge prize. Click here for more.

The committee unanimously agreed that Grier’s monumental two-volume critical edition of the works of the eleventh century monk Adémar of Chabannes was a scholarly achievement of the highest order. Many of the musical texts transcribed here have not previously appeared in modern editions. Committee members praised the meticulous scholarship evident in the introduction and the transcriptions, and they noted the similarly high quality of the philological work. They also drew attention to the elegance and clarity of the written presentation. The committee believes that this work not only makes a significant contributionas to medieval musicology, but that those contributions will be of lasting scholarly value.

Koopmans surveys more than seventy-five collections and offers a new model for understanding how miracle stories were generated, circulated, and replicated. She argues that orally exchanged narratives carried far more propagandistic power than those preserved in manuscripts; stresses the literary and memorial roles of miracle collecting; and traces changes in form and content as the focus of the collectors shifted from the stories told by religious colleagues to those told by lay visitors to their churches.

Wonderful to Relate highlights the importance of the two massive collections written by Benedict of Peterborough and William of Canterbury in the wake of the murder of Thomas Becket in 1170. Koopmans provides the first in-depth examination of the creation and influence of the Becket compilations, often deemed the greatest of all medieval miracle collections. In a final section, she ponders the decline of miracle collecting in the thirteenth century, which occurred with the advent of formalized canonization procedures and theological means of engaging with the miraculous. More...

2011 ~ Frank Mantello and Joseph Goering, Letters of Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln. University of Toronto Press, 2010.

Robert Grosseteste (c.1170-1253) was an English statesman, philosopher, theologian, and bishop of Lincoln, and also one of the most controversial figures in his country's episcopate. His long life coincided with the central period of institutional, intellectual, and religious consolidation in medieval Europe and his letters provide important insights into the practices and preoccupations of the English clergy and laity in the first half of the thirteenth century.

This volume contains the first complete translation of Grosseteste's collected Latin letters and shows that these were most likely chosen and arranged by Grosseteste himself. Shedding light on some of the period's crucial debates on issues of theology, law, pastoral care, and episcopal authority, Frank Mantello and Joseph Goering's richly annotated English translation makes his letters more accessible than ever for scholars and students, and for those interested in medieval history, religion, and culture.

The emergence of modern Western artwork is sometimes cast as a slow process of secularization, with the devotional charge of images giving way in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to a focus on the beauty and innovation of the artwork itself. Our understanding of art in this pivotal age is badly distorted, focused almost exclusively on religious and civic images. Even many Renaissance specialists believe that little secular painting survives before the late fifteenth century, and its appearance becomes a further argument for the secularizing of art.

This book asks how history changes when a longer record of secular art is explored. It is the first study in any language of the decoration of Italian palaces and homes between 1300 and the mid-Quattrocento, and it argues that early secular painting was crucial to the development of modern ideas of art. Of the cycles discussed, some have been studied and published, but most are essentially unknown. A first aim is to enrich understanding of the early Renaissance by introducing a whole corpus of secular painting that has been too long overlooked. Yet Painted Palaces is not a study of iconography. In examining the prehistory of painted rooms like Mantegna s Camera Picta, the larger goal is to rethink the history of early Renaissance art.

In Printing the Middle Ages Siân Echard looks to the postmedieval, postmanuscript lives of medieval texts, seeking to understand the lasting impact on both the popular and the scholarly imaginations of the physical objects that transmitted the Middle Ages to the English-speaking world. Beneath and behind the foundational works of recovery that established the canon of medieval literature, she argues, was a vast terrain of books, scholarly or popular, grubby or beautiful, widely disseminated or privately printed. By turning to these, we are able to chart the differing reception histories of the literary texts of the British Middle Ages. For Echard, any reading of a medieval text, whether past or present, amateur or academic, floats on the surface of a complex sea of expectations and desires made up of the books that mediate those readings.

Each chapter of Printing the Middle Ages focuses on a central textual object and tells its story in order to reveal the history of its reception and transmission. Moving from the first age of print into the early twenty-first century, Echard examines the special fonts created in the Elizabethan period to reproduce Old English, the hand-drawn facsimiles of the nineteenth century, and today's experiments with the digital reproduction of medieval objects; she explores the illustrations in eighteenth-century versions of Guy of Warwick and Bevis of Hampton; she discusses nineteenth-century children's versions of the Canterbury Tales and the aristocratic transmission history of John Gower's Confessio Amantis; and she touches on fine press printings of Dante, Froissart, and Langland.